Children may outgrow Halloween -- but what about their parents?

Photo courtesy of the Chipkin family.Deborah Chipkin, who is now 21 and a student at Rutgers University, seen in one of the many Halloween costumes she wore in her trick-or-treating days.

With all the ghosts and goblins filling the fall air this week, I am reminded of my scariest Halloween of all.

The night we lost our last trick-or-treater.

I suppose we should have seen it coming the year before when after an hour of half-hearted trick-or-treating our 12-year-old informed us she would just as soon head home and take up her post in our doorway handing out candy to hobgoblins and witches with outstretched hands.

“I don’t really get the point,” said said with a wisdom beyond her years, “I mean who really needs all this stuff?”

Well, we did. Not the dentist’s delight of Musketeers and Mounds, and Snickers of course, or the heaven-forbid paranoid’s fantasy of unwashed apples and LSD-tainted Candy Corn. What we needed was for time to go backward to the sweet-faced youngest child pulling on our sleeves begging to stay up as late as her sisters, and dressing herself as a gumball even though it seemed as if she could barely walk at all, flouncing around the room, and asking us to chew her up.

Which we did, with relish.

I guess we thought the trick-or-treating trio would last forever, these three sisters who reluctantly at first, and then with a kind of resigned bemusement headed off into the cold October air dressed as witches, or princesses, or tramps, or playing cards or clowns. And even as through the years the trio became a duo and at last a solo, we comforted ourselves with the thought that having a trick-or-treater in the house meant that there was at least one person left under our roof who believed in the special and somewhat frightful magic of a full moon set against a jet black sky.

And then there was none.

We kept hoping her lackluster interest in Halloween was just a matter of procrastination. More than once we had been pressed into service to make a late-night run to an all-night store to pick over the remants of costumes too tacky or too grotesque to be wanted by more prepared trick-or-treaters.

And more than once, we had pressed our own pitiful home skills into service persuading one child or another that punching a hole in a pillow case did make an impressive ghost; or that one or two dabs of makeup and a bandana, did a pirate make.

But there was no last-minute reprieve. No “ohmygod-it’s-Halloween-and-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it?” cry from the corner bedroom. Only an announcement that this was the year she would forego Halloween night. She had more important things to do.

More important, like what? Like watching her favorite television show about some boring 20-somethings complaining about their catch-as-catch-can love lives; or talking to her friends about just who might be in the running for teacher’s pet of the week; or waiting for the latest text message of who-liked-who-who-liked-who-liked-whom.

All of which left my wife and I in the rather undignified position of begging our daughter to go out trick-or-treating just one last time; to come home just one last time with too much candy, and too little sleep so that we would not have to face our scariest night of the year.

Alas, it was thanks, but no thanks. She’d be quite happy enough to grab some of the leftover candy that survived the night for her lunch tomorrow. But really, – and the words still ring in my ear across the years – Halloween was mostly for kids.

And for parents, I should have added, who still need kids.

Because no matter how you slice it, growing up is the dirtiest trick of all.